Scotland isn't different, it's Britain that's bizarre

Britain is in a state of self denial, sitting at the bottom of European league tables, but convinced it still rules the waves. The aspirations of the SNP may seem ambitious, but all they are really proposing is to be a normal European country.

renewable energy use across the EU

There is a trope I hear a lot at the
moment: “Scotland is different”. Left to lie, on its own, with no
explanation, it's a sort of petty nationalism. The idea that any one
group of people is intrinsically unlike any other
strikes me as a perverse way to understand humanity.

In most of Europe, in fact, in most of
the world, the idea that significant portions of your economy would
be publicly owned is
quite standard. In Northern Europe, it's not abnormal to have
decent childcare provision, to work a sensible number of hours a day,
and to be more productive in total as a result.

No, when people say that Scotland is
different, that the social democratic aspirations of Scots are an
anomaly, they are missing the point entirely. The social attitudes of
Scots, and the policies of the Scottish Parliament, are pretty much
standard for a European country. Scotland isn't the exception, it's
the rule.

Most people in the South East of England
never seem to understand this. Blinded by the headlights and headlines of post
imperial UK nationalism, the idea that “Britain is Great”
pervades. We (I live in the South East at the moment) cling with white fisted knuckles to the notion that
Britannia rules, unwilling to let go of our imperial past for fear
that we might find we are just another European country. It's a myth which works much more in England, and which helps explain differences in the tendancy to believe immigrant scapegoating North and South of the border "if Britain is uniquely great" people infer "it can't be the system that's to blame, it must be outsiders".

But the truth
is that this is a very sick country indeed. We are investing
a net figure of nothing in our future economy, and instead just
about keep our head above water by flogging
off our assets at a rate which would astonish almost any other country
and re-inflating speculative bubbles which suck any wealth we do create into an
unproductive black hole London housing market which eats wealth out
of the rest of the country, hoovering any investment away from anything
productive and then complaining when it's asked to redistribute crumbs
from its table.

A metropolis once at the centre of the
biggest empire in human history and now at the centre of a global
revolution of money-men over making things, of the wealthy over the
rest is disguised by a blanket of post-imperial false confidence.
Post-imperial Britain is a very strange, very damaged place. And before the people
of these islands, the English in particular, can move on, and find a
new place in the world, they need someone to finally point out that
not only is this former emperor naked, not only does he no longer rule
the waves, but his failure to grapple sensibly with either of these
facts has led to some pretty unhealthy habits. Telling a difficult
truth is what friends are for. In part, that's what Scotland's
referendum will be about.

But for most Scots, it'll be about
their families and their communities. And so for them, it's important
to understand this: when people say that Scotland could do better,
this isn't about some nationalist belief that the talents or the
solidaristic instincts of the Scots are unique. In order to be a
significantly nicer place to live, all that Scotland needs is to be
normal. Compared to being in broken Britain, living in a bog-standard,
average Western country may seem like an impossible, utopian
fairy-land, to which only naïve children conned by lying politicians
would aspire. But for most of the Western world, the sort of Scotland
that the SNP talk about, that most yes campaigners say we can expect,
isn't exceptional, it's not even better than average. I am a radical.
I hope we can achieve much more. But the “cloud cuckoo land”
aspiration of the Scottish Government is to be an average, run of
the mill, bog-standard European country. Compared to where we are
now, that would be a great start.

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